Ragged Claws

 
I am like the shadows
that leap from the fire,
that run with the cars
that speed through the night.
I am like the shadows
that fall from the lamp-post
and stand there
like Lily Marlene.
I am a rain of dark,
a river of night,
touched by the flames
and the heat of your flesh
and the call of our hungry hearts.

 
All of you so quiet.
Stars and moon so quiet.
Night,
a night of dreams,
perfect and still.
A story of stars, that
move through the night;
and you, as
beautiful as time,
that stops and starts.
This night and you:
my naked shield -
so quiet,
so beautiful
and quiet.

 
(A bit of character assassination)
Given that the play has moments of obscurity,
even before it tumbles into awkwardness,
and admitting further that a character
who has to face a bungled plot
cannot be held responsible for all his failures,
Hamlet truly is pathetic:
seeing ghosts and playing hard to get,
fleeing to England and then back again,
suddenly deciding madness is its [...]

 
Fireflies and flowers and mummified pharaohs:
everything’s dying with breakneck speed.
All of our moments are dying around us;
we’re shedding our breath with our skin.
Mozart is gone and so is next century;
now is the skull within.
There are no morals and there is no prayer
against or to Entropy.
Fireflies and flowers and mummified pharaohs:
it has been tried in bronze [...]

So, it’s bubbly
and what of it?
Drowning men
can tell you
that has nothing much to do
with taste

 
Full moon and out of whiskey,
almost out of money
and half out of my mind,
I scribble notes;
my thoughts are drawn
in black and Sartre.
I can almost touch
the lady of the lake,
the woman of all lonely dreams,
sitting next to me
on her pale pedestal,
ordering Daiquiris like so many ships.
And she couldn’t care less
about another soaking wreck,
drawn in prying, floating [...]

He watches them from the room’s only window, late in the evening, or when he wakes up from a dream in the middle of the night.
The dreams are clear and show the past: a wife, children, a job, a house. When he wakes up the veil comes down again, quiet and intangible, unbeatable. Then the [...]

 
I give up.
I give up on words.
Shut me up.
Take me to the dance
and I will bow.
I will surrender.
Take me down
and take me longing.
Shut me up.

I’m done with soft snow
falling onto battlefields;
all symbols that make nice
with senseless dying.

Branches of dead trees
scrape the darkened windows;
my love,
I need you desperately.

When I was seven years’ old,
I overheard my parents talking of the tanks;
the broken promises of spring,
the utter misery of things.
I didn’t understand of course;
I didn’t understand at all.
But I knew of death already.
Death was my favourite aunt,
who couldn’t come to birthdays anymore.
Death was a sudden silence in the midst of play.
This Prague thing was [...]

 
I can see you naked,
in the morning,
opening the windows,
letting out the night,
tasting all the smells of morning
on your tongue, while
early sun-beams stroke your body,
coat your hair with tender light;
your eyes still moist with dream,
your lips half-parted;
breath as soft and silt as sheets,
now left abandoned on your bed.
I can see you naked,
looking at the sky;
your back [...]

The dragon slept in the heart of the mountain. It dreamt of rivers of fire and molten flesh, that transformed the valley below into a lake of blood-red flames. It dreamt that the moon caught fire and broke into pieces, which came down in a red rain that wrapped the earth in a burning [...]

 
Medea was the only one
to mourn her children.
Her hands could not stop shaking,
yet blood and ghosts clung to them.
In shopping malls her soul cries out:
Because of the children.
She clings to priests,
who do their duty
on the graveyard shift.
The churches are stone.
My children, part of my body
your father entered and left: please come back.
Medea is playing lady [...]

The Towers fall;
the dead lie buried.
Dust is settling down.
The city reels,
recovers.
Life and love go on.
I think of you -
I think of swallows
that outran the storm.
The clouds are rising.
All around us lightning strikes
and life and love go on.

From Babylon I call in chains, in songs -
in stories that the old and broken-hearted
told us through the flames of captive nights,
where they spoke of the gold in the temple,
and the heavy, velvet curtains that were hung
between the face of the Lord and His servants,
of the battles that were lost and won.
From Babylon I call [...]

There was road rage and road kill
on each slippery stone
of the highway to Heaven -
and bumper to bumper,
drive-by hysterics
of mad, gridlocked souls.
Oh, the pushing and shoving
on the stairway to Heaven;
terrible cursing,
when soles stepped on fingers;
horrible screaming,
when the dearly departed fell off.
So, my love,
we won’t go there.
We’ll go deep down and dirty;
sniffing the sulphur, so close
to [...]

 
For R. 
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
Pablo Neruda
1) I love the way your colours run through me
I love the way your colours run through me;
the way your dreams like landscapes grow
(like road maps, towers, rivers, trees
mushrooming like crazy)
inside me,
till I lie - so full,
so blissfully aware that I [...]

 
First thing they do
is cut up your dick.
Then they tell you:
don’t eat this and that.
They take you to a desert,
you had no wish to visit in the first place.
The Promised Land, they say,
of bombs and snipers.
And everybody hates you
(and you can’t stop bickering
about the cost of living
and the price of milk and honey.)
The Chosen, yes, [...]